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Life & Times Transcript

06/15/06

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

A school that immerses its students in their cultural heritage, but does it go too far?

Doug McIntyre>> Here is a school with taxpayer dollars that is literally targeting one specific ethnic enclave.

Marcus Aguilar>> The appreciation of one's culture does not necessarily translate into hating somebody else's culture.

Val Zavala>> And then, they share a lake house, a dog, even a tree, but they live two years apart? Can our FilmWeek critics figure it out?

[Film Clip]

Val Zavala>> It's all straight ahead on tonight's Life and Times.

Announcer>> Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Val Zavala>> It's a small elementary school that's stirring up a big controversy. Is it overdoing the cultural content of its curriculum? The student body is almost entirely Mexican American, yet they're taught a language that isn't spoken anymore and they learn math on an abacus. Test scores are low and criticism is high, including those who say they put ethnic heritage over education. Hena Cuevas went to El Sereno to find out.

Hena Cuevas>> The teachings at this elementary school are hot topics on talk radio.

>> "The big thing that's been lost in this is that the public education system is set up to produce American citizens, period."

Hena Cuevas>> This is Academia Semillas del Pueblo Academy, an elementary school in El Sereno just south of Pasadena. It's now at the center of a growing controversy playing over the airwaves.

>> "To indoctrinate a group of kids and separate them and say this is your culture is not doing society any good."

Hena Cuevas>> Here the sounds of Chinese are nothing new.

[Film Clip]

Hena Cuevas>> Nor is it unusual to see kids using ancient Indian techniques to learn math.

[Film Clip]

Hena Cuevas>> Academia caters mainly to children of Mexican immigrant families. Its approach? Culturally relevant education. It means these three hundred kids are learning, among other things, Tai Chi, Aztec dance and Mandarin Chinese, plus Nahuatl, a dead language once spoken by the ancient Aztec Indians.

Marcus Aguilar>> We're including a multi-lingual and very dynamic and creative way of teaching, which is a boost.

Hena Cuevas>> Marcus Aguilar is the principal. He founded the school in 2001. He wanted to teach these immigrant children in their own language about their own culture and ancestry.

Marcus Aguilar>> The appreciation of one's culture does not necessarily translate into hating somebody else's culture, even if it's European.

Hena Cuevas>> Nearly ninety percent of the student body is Mexican, but why are some calling for it to be shut down?

Doug McIntyre>> "And we're going to continue our coverage of the controversies swirling around the charter school in Los Angeles, Academia . . ."

Hena Cuevas>> One of Aguilar's biggest critics is Doug McIntyre, host of the Early Morning Show on KABC radio.

Doug McIntyre>> And yet here is a school with taxpayer dollars that is literally targeting one specific ethnic enclave and saying we will teach you in your cultural traditions, your language, your global vision.

Hena Cuevas>> McIntyre first heard about the school in early May. That's when listeners sent him an email about an unusual elementary school.

Doug McIntyre>> He mentioned that the school teaches Nahuatl and Mandarin and it caught my curiosity, so we started looking into it. It turns out that the listener was right about a highly provocative curriculum, to say the least.

Hena Cuevas>> According to McIntyre, after that email, KABC radio decided to send one of their news reporters even though co-founder Aguilar had declined numerous requests for an interview. What happened after the reporter got here is what catapulted the story to a national level. That's because he claimed somebody tried to run him over with a car and took away the tape out of his recorder. The LAPD is investigating. However, Aguilar denies knowing anything about the incident.

Marcus Aguilar>> By the time I got here, though, he had left already and I really don't know what else happened.

Hena Cuevas>> One explanation he's given is that parents were worried that the reporter was a pedophile taking pictures of the children. McIntyre isn't buying it.

Doug McIntyre>> And I find it deeply disturbing because, you know, if a reporter can't go to a grade school to cover a story that is theoretically as benign as this -- I mean, there's a controversy, but physical violence is utterly unacceptable.

Hena Cuevas>> McIntyre is also concerned about what the children might be learning, considering Aguilar's activist background. Aguilar believes these children should be taught separately from mainstream kids. It's a view he presented to the school board when he first applied to establish the school.

Doug McIntyre>> He doesn't hide and never did try to hide. I give him points for being honest. He presented a separatist ideology to the school board and the school board approved it.

Minnie Ferguson>> There's a difference between teaching and indoctrinating. We don't indoctrinate here. We teach.

Hena Cuevas>> Minnie Ferguson is co-director of the school. She says they're simply responding to the needs of the community.

Minnie Ferguson>> What we look at in terms of cultures is the philosophy, the morals, the traditions, the teaching of different cultures and how children learn from them all.

Hena Cuevas>> One thing that's different is there are no age-based grades, so different ages learn together. Also, there are no walls and no formal classrooms. But isn't it something that it gets really loud because, if you have a classroom here and then you have another classroom there, isn't it disruptive?

Marcus Aguilar>> Well, there's a workshop environment. You know, there are several labs all around. The students are constantly interacting. They're dialoging with each other. The teachers are able to interact with each other. You know, there's pretty much an ability to communicate with each other.

Gerardo Perez>> It's kind of like a calculator for indigenous people because back then they didn't have electricity. This would be their calculator.

Hena Cuevas>> Another distinction? The kids are taught math using an Aztec abacus.

Gilbert Perez>> Basically, it's going like twenty-one, twenty, four hundred, eight thousand. On this side, you're just multiplying it by five, one hundred, two thousand, forty thousand.

Gerardo Perez>> So basically the whole thing is multiplied by twenty.

Hena Cuevas>> Eleven year old Gilbert Perez and twelve year old Gerardo Perez have been at the school since it began.

Gerardo Perez>> We've been coming here for four years and we've been studying Chinese, Nahuatl, Spanish, English, all for four years.

Hena Cuevas>> So with four languages and Aztec math, how much are the children really learning? The answer is, not much. A look at the Academic Performance Index, or API, showed the Academia del Pueblo scores just over five hundred points out of a total of a thousand, making it one of the lowest scoring schools in Los Angeles County. Aguilar says the scores are a reflection of where these kids are coming from and are no different from other schools in the area.

Marcus Aguilar>> The measures of progress are there. You know, unfortunately, others have focused on simply API test scores. But the reality is that our students came to our school for the most part with low scores.

Doug McIntyre>> Even by the standards of other socio-economic challenged schools, Academia performs awful. The numbers are abysmal and, when you look at the whole picture, it raises some provocative questions.

Hena Cuevas>> What about the criticism that they're being taught a language that they're not going to be using? Shouldn't that time be used to teach them something that will be relevant later on?

Marcus Aguilar>> I think that's a racist position. I think that it's racist to believe that simply because an indigenous language is not well known in the United States that it should therefore no longer exist and that students should therefore no longer learn it.

Hena Cuevas>> But how prepared will these kids be after eighth grade when they have to go into a traditional school system?

Marcus Aguilar>> You know, we're not designing the curriculums of schools for students to transition into another public school.

Doug McIntyre>> And it's not fair to the kids and I think that the kids are being used as pawns for a radical political agenda and I don't believe that it has any place in a Los Angeles school system that's struggling to get reading, writing and arithmetic right.

Hena Cuevas>> Academia Semillas del Pueblo is a charter school which means it has control over its curriculum. Still, it must renew its charter by next January. That's when the school board will be taking a closer look at test scores, among other things, to determine if ethnic education is what's best for these children. I'm Hena Cuevas for Life and Times.

Announcer>> Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, plus transcripts and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most interesting features. Just go to kcet.org, scroll down the page and click on "Life and Times".

Val Zavala>> He didn't have to go down to this squalid place and he certainly didn't have to go back, but he's returned time and time again. He is Los Angeles Times columnist, Steve Lopez, and he's made the homeless his cause. Toni Guinyard went down to Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles to get a tour from Lopez himself.

Steve Lopez>> This all begins a little over a year ago when I was walking through downtown Los Angeles and came upon a guy playing a violin who clearly was living out of a shopping cart. You know, it's a pretty striking picture. It's like where was this guy schooled that he plays this well and, if he does play this well, then why is he living on the streets?

Toni Guinyard>> Nathaniel?

Steve Lopez>> Nathaniel is his name. Nathaniel Anthony Ayre.

Toni Guinyard>> And you have to establish trust before anybody's going to tell you anything. How long did you have to work on that?

Steve Lopez>> Well, with Nathaniel, it took several visits before I could just walk up to him and not have him go like this because, you know, he's schizophrenic. He's been living that way for about the last thirty-five years, most of them without any treatment and also most of them without a roof over his head.

So you live out on the streets like that and you end up in a place like this and you learn these defensive poses. Of the several thousand people living on the streets, you've got to figure that a third to a half have mental health issues.

When I got to know Nathaniel well and began to care about him and he was more than just a subject in my column, when he became a friend and I was concerned about his welfare, especially after spending a night out here with him and seeing what he was up against, I just thought there's something really, really, seriously wrong about this. I mean, what kind of society allows people who are so desperately ill to sleep on these sidewalks, you know, to fend for themselves when there are predators here just released from jail?

You know, when I saw Nathaniel reach for two sticks in a shopping cart -- on one he had written Brahms and the other Beethoven. As we were bedding down for the night not far from here, I said, "What are sticks for?" He said, "Those are to chase the rats away."

Here's this man, Julliard educated, a guy who amazes me at every visit with the things that he knows, going to sleep at night and he's got these sticks that he taps on the sidewalk. Sure enough, the rats came out of the sewers and they're coming right at us. He taps them and the rats go away. He says, "Good night, Mr. Lopez. I hope you rest well. I hope the whole world rests well tonight."

I would say, "Nathaniel, you see the lights in these buildings? There are people living there. Why don't you want to live there? Let's get you a place. We can work on this together." He had no interest. You know, people like to think that you've made a moral choice to live on the streets chasing rats away with a stick. It's not a moral choice. It's a result of whatever predicament you're in, whether you've got some form of addiction, whether you've got a mental health issue. So people like Nathaniel have just been left to these streets.

Toni Guinyard>> Why did you focus on this issue?

Steve Lopez>> Because I met somebody that I cared about. Maybe that's a selfish reason. Maybe it's the wrong reason. But, yeah, he opened my eyes to the fact that I work four or five blocks away from this abomination, from these horrible conditions. I mean, this is a snapshot of social disintegration at its worst.

When you got people, you know, trying to survive on these streets desperate with their illnesses and their fears, you just know that you got to do better. So my purpose when I really got to know the depth of the trouble was to just share it with people. Here's what I'm finding out. You tell me what you think. Is this the kind of city you want to live in? Does this make us proud? Any of us?

These were not my first trips to Skid Row. I would come here before, but when you don't have a personal investment -- and none of us do. At least, you don't think that you do. I mean, if you start to think of the economics, maybe you do have a personal stake in it.

Toni Guinyard>> But your approach is more than economics.

Steve Lopez>> Yeah, but, you know, I think that people, you know, one problem they have with the whole thing is, oh, what am I going to do? What are you going to take my tax dollars for now? What are you going to bill me, you know, take a bigger nick out of me? You know, I think that, if you do this right, if you take care of this problem the way it should be taken care of, it actually is good for the bottom line as well. You save money in the long run.

You know, the classic example is somebody who costs, you know, the county and costs taxpayers a hundred thousand dollars, maybe a million dollars, a year because the problem is never dealt with. Maybe they get arrested for being mentally ill. Maybe they get arrested for being evicted and they're in a jail that can't hold them. You know, we're paying the salaries of all those people. Then they kick them back out here without addressing any of the problems that put them here to begin with.

This thing repeats and repeats and repeats and I think, if you take somebody like Nathaniel and you can be patient enough to gain his trust and lead him to an opportunity at a better life, then he might take advantage of it. This is what we're seeing with Nathaniel. It took months, but Nathaniel now lives with a roof over his head every night. The man who refused to ever set foot on the property of LAMP, the mental health agency, finally started showing up.

I look forward to the day when we open that studio and Nathaniel as artist in residence gives his first performance. Who knows where he's headed? These are dangerous streets, as we've said, and I worry at night when the phone rings thinking it's going to be a phone call I don't want to get.

But I think it's possible that Nathaniel could live a better life, you know, living with a roof over his head and with this new mission to, you know, be artist in residence at his own little studio. He's already told me that this is not about him. He wants to embrace all of the arts, not just music. He wants to have theater, he wants to have art exhibits and do the whole thing.

So if you can do that with one life, why can't you do it with another and another and another and another? I mean, it's not really a miracle here. It's just hard work and caring and having the professional staff at a place like LAMP to back it all up. I mean, we can do it, so why not?

Look, I write a column. This is not some passive little "here's what I think you might want to consider". It's two-fisted and it's in your face and that was the whole point of the Skid Row series. Guess what? This is the city you live in. Enjoy your breakfast, but you're going to have to get this down along with your eggs and your bacon because this is where you live and this is who you are.

So, yeah, you got to have a little bit of punch. You know, I'm not shy about it. If you don't, then maybe the mayor doesn't call you and say, "Hey, I'm reading the series. Can I come out with you?" Maybe other public officials who are more inclined to hide behind their desks on issues like this wouldn't have come out.

I mean, it was meant to embarrass them and it was not by accident that I referred to the location of these problems three blocks from City Hall and four blocks from this multi-billion dollar new skyline that we're pouring even more billions into. We should be ashamed and my job is to tell you and then to point you to the solution, so that's what I'm trying to do.

Announcer>> To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us by mail at this address:

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Larry Mantle>> Welcome to FilmWeek on Life and Times. I'm Larry Mantle of 89.3 KPCC. Our first film this week is the romantic time adventure, "The Lake House". It stars Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock.

[Film Clip]

Larry Mantle>> I'm joined this week by critics Peter Rainer of the Christian Science Monitor and Lael Loewenstein of Variety. Peter, you going to start us on "The Lake House"?

Peter Rainer>> It doesn't float (laughter). This is a pretty wan romance. It's weepy, really, but not really a successful one either. The premise doesn't really parse logically, you know.

There are all sorts of things that you don't expect to have happen in real life that you see in the movies, but still the notion that Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock live two years apart and she never thinks to like email him or look up his phone number in the directory to try to get in touch with him, none of that really seems to occur to anybody in this film. Instead, they just act really mopey. He's mopey in the year 2004, an architect, not a very successful one, and she's in a mopey position in 2006.

The whole movie is supposed to try to root for them to get together, you know, and the great romance and the reach for consummation, but instead it's kind of like that movie "The Break-Up" of a few weeks ago. You know, all you could hope for was that the couple would not get together. Here, you kind of say, well, if they get together, okay, but if not, that's fine too. You know, there's just no heft to this film at all. It's a great romance. It has to have great spirit and this doesn't.

Larry Mantle>> All right. What did you think, Lael?

Lael Loewenstein>> Yeah, I think that to do a kind of magical, realist, romantic fable like this, you have to have something special. The movie, "Somewhere in Time", which I didn't see, but there are legions of fans that loved that story about lovers across time that get together, that elicited a great following. This movie won't. Usually keeping lovers apart as this movie does results in some increasing romantic tension. It doesn't at all in this case. It just makes you kind of wish that the movie would end.

There are a couple of things I liked. There were a couple of little motifs. There's a little bit when Sandra Bullock is leaving Keanu Reeves a letter in the mailbox. The little mailbox flag goes up and he can't see her, but he can see the flag go up and then it goes down and then, when he reads her letter, the same thing happens. So that's a cute little bit. And there are some little bits where they have conversations back and forth as they're reading each other's letters. That's sort of charming, but in the end, it wasn't enough to have any sort of charisma or romantic momentum.

Larry Mantle>> Our second film this week is the drama, "Loverboy". It's directed by Kevin Bacon and it stars his real-life wife, Kyra Sedgwick. It has quite an all-star ensemble cast as well in the story of a mother who tries to shelter her gifted son from the rest of the world.

[Film Clip]

Larry Mantle>> Lael, your thoughts on "Loverboy"?

Lael Loewenstein>> Well, "Loverboy" is mainly a star vehicle for Kyra Sedgwick and she's very good in it, but there are some problems with the film. Sedgwick plays an overly possessive mother, Emily, whose main agenda for a number of years was to just get pregnant, so she sleeps with every man she can find. Her theory is many men results in no father. So she finally eventually does conceive a child and she knows who the father is, but the father is nowhere in sight. It's actually Campbell Scott in a little cameo.

She raises this child on her own and everything goes fine until, at six years old, little Paul suddenly develops an independent streak and he wants, well, less to do with her. That's normal, as any parent knows. Your kids get older, they need you less, but Emily is threatened by outside influences and she tries to keep him out of school, she tries to keep him out of the playground and soon the vicious possessiveness that you've seen throughout the film start to have a kind of dark and ominous quality to them and you see that she's just quite a bit unhinged.

There's also flashbacks to her childhood where, as a child of Kevin Bacon's, who also directs, and Marisa Tomei, she was largely neglected and ignored. You see that the seeds of this are from her childhood. The film doesn't really come together. It doesn't really explain why she is the way she is or even kind of have any sort of logic to it. I thought the ending kind of sells it out as well.

Larry Mantle>> All right. "Mommy Weirdest", so to speak. What did you think, Peter?

Peter Rainer>> I thought even less of it. I think this is a really dreary, unpleasant movie in ways that weren't intended. I think the Kyra Sedgwick character is supposed to be in some ways this free spirit, you know, this sort of super hippie earth mother who just cares too much about her child.

That�s a forgivable fault, but in fact she's rather deranged as is borne out later on in the movie in ways I think are made much too lightly. The effect on the child is really minimized too. In my experience, he would not react in that way to a mother who was that, you know, unhinged about his own welfare.

It has a great cast. There's Oliver Platt, Matt Dillon. Campbell Scott has a wonderful little cameo. The omnipresent Sandra Bullock is even in the film again. But they're all in little tiny roles, so don't be fooled. They're not in the movie very long, these people.

Larry Mantle>> And finally this week, the documentary "Giuliani Time". Obvious what the subject matter of this film is. It takes a look back quite deep into the life of the former New York mayor.

[Film Clip]

Larry Mantle>> Lael, the documentary "Giuliani Times"?

Lael Loewenstein>> Well, I was quite surprised to see that this was an attempt to completely redraft the reputation and legacy of Giuliani who, as everyone knows, was nearly sanctified after 9/11. Everyone thought what a wonderful mayor, he handled all the crises in New York and the terrorism. He was such a national hero. He was Times Man of the Year, so on and so forth.

This movie goes back to his roots growing up in New York. He even has interviews with Wayne Barrett whose book "Rudy" documents some of the hitherto before unknown mafia connections of Giuliani's family, spends a lot of time on Giuliani's mayoral years when, frankly, after having been D.A. and having a sort of controversial time as D.A., he became mayor and pretty much proceeded to relocate the homeless all out of the city, was involved in some very troubling racial incident involving Abner Louima.

You know, there were all kinds of riots around this time and a lot of concern about how poorly Giuliani really handled his time there. There were concerns of totalitarian and Machiavellian in many ways. So this movie brings all this back to the fore, exposes it again to an audience who had forgotten about that and casts him in a new light. It's an interesting piece.

Larry Mantle>> And that's a wrap for another FilmWeek on Life and Times. I'm Larry Mantle of 89.3 KPCC joined by critics Peter Rainer of the Christian Science Monitor and Lael Loewenstein of Variety. We invite you to join us next week at this same time for our next FilmWeek on Life and Times.

Val Zavala>> A full hour of FilmWeek airs on KPCC radio Friday mornings at eleven. And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at Life and Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

Announcer>> Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Sponsored in part by:


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